


ALL HUMANS ARE SECRETLY BIRDS AND ALL BIRDS ARE SECRETLY IMMORTAL

by perennials



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Gen, Weird Bird Analogies, ch 393 spoilers (sort of), extremely unplanned for character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:26:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24237250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: A modern retelling of the hit Pixar film, "Up".
Comments: 20
Kudos: 186





	ALL HUMANS ARE SECRETLY BIRDS AND ALL BIRDS ARE SECRETLY IMMORTAL

**Author's Note:**

> me (typing through tears): life is both fair and completely unfair

Hoshiumi Kourai has never looked at the ground. When he was a child he stared at his feet sometimes to hide the fact that he was upset and/or on the verge of tears. He also happened to be the kind of elementary schooler who believed that a four leaf clover would make you and your family immortal, and so spent much of his time squatting at the park, plucking at the dried grass that had built up around the playground and near the public toilets. But all of this stopped very early on in his youth, when he got mad at basketball for being Like That, switched over to volleyball, and discovered that volleyball was in fact also Like This.

Like what? Like this. Kourai tilts his head to one side like a seagull. This, he says, stomping the polished floorboards beneath his feet. Volleyball is like this. Around you the stadium roars to life. The bleachers flood with people and the ceiling lights wink into existence. The commentators for today’s match slide into position in the commentator’s booth high up in the air, mouthpieces almost touching the corners of their smiles.

Kourai steps onto the court with the ocean lapping at his fingertips. He holds his head high as if to preserve something balanced on the tip of his nose, but does so nonchalantly. This something is unimportant; he does not mind if it breaks.

Everything breaks eventually. When this one does, he will simply have to find a new one.

  
::

  
When Kourai found out volleyball was a game of height, he felt the same kind of bone-shattering devastation that he had felt when he first visited Tokyo DisneySea and the twenty-something-year-old at the entrance to the kiddie roller coaster told him he was too short to ride. He protested loudly and emotionally. He cited his student identification card, and had his mother produce it as additional evidence. But they said no.

Volleyball, at first, was also a series of no’s. First it was no you aren’t cool enough and no you aren’t good enough, so he went home and threw his Pokemon stuffed animals at the living room wall and got yelled at by his mother. Then it was no you aren’t strong enough and no you don’t have the kind of hitting power we need, so he drank all three cartons of milk in the fridge at once and stayed home for a week. His mother didn’t yell at him this time. Neither did she comfort him. Kourai was on the brink of something, and though it pained her to see it, he would have to peek over the edge for himself.

Eventually, the truth emerged. It was neither an accusation nor an insult. It wasn’t the kind of thing one expected elementary school bullying to be all about. It wasn’t bullying, not really.

It was just two words: you’re short. And maybe two more, if the other party was feeling sympathetic. I’m sorry. We’re sorry.

Kourai stared at ‘the other party’ so hard he thought his eyes might pop out. He thought that might be good. If his eyes flew out of his skull they might ricochet off of Kawai-kun’s forehead and then he might grow a pimple. Pimples were evil and painful and would get you yelled at by your mother.

He liked volleyball. He also liked kiddie roller coasters, and adult roller coasters, and the Tower of Terror ride he had walked past eight times now in his lifetime. Kourai had been keeping count. He was biding his time.

“Sorry,” Kawai-kun repeated again, then ran off very fast to join the rest of his friends/teammates/the tall people club he had been secretly initiated into on the day of his birth. Kourai went home and threw everything in the fridge at a kitchen wall until his mother came back, and did not yell at him, and instead told him a story.

  
::

  
So once upon a time there was a seagull that wanted to be a swan. But he was, like, biologically a seagull. So he couldn’t do all the cool stuff swans did, like float on pond-surfaces and reach down to grab shoots from the waterbed and curve their necks to form heart-shapes with other swans. He didn’t have the neck, you know. Or the beak. Or the feathers. He had seagull feathers.

He still really wanted to be a swan though. He’d lived on the land all his life and only visited the beach sometimes to steal ice cream from the humans that liked to walk stupidly along the beach and eat ice cream. So he beat his wings with all his might until he stumbled upon a small marsh, hidden between two cities full of pigeons.

“Hello,” he said, alighting on a rock sticking out of the water. “How can I be more like you?”

“That was abrupt,” said a nearby swan. They arched their neck into half of a heart-shape. The seagull felt a twinge of jealousy. “I mean,” they continued, arching their neck until it seemed they could not arch it any further. “You’re, what, a seagull? Isn’t this not going to work out?”

The twinge of jealousy grew into a large ice cream cone of jealousy. The seagull bristled with his seagull feathers. “Being a seagull sucks,” he said angrily. “You live on the land but everyone thinks you’re always flying around above the sea. All the fish are scared of you and swim away when you come near them. And the truth is in spite of all the sea stuff, you’re scared of the ocean.”

The swan watched him talk curiously. They didn’t seem angry or upset or pissed, which the seagull figured was a good thing. Swans were probably more powerful than him. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t know much about swans other than that they were tall and majestic and cool.

“You know,” said the swan, dipping their beak into the water to clip a clump of seaweed. “Swans are scared of things too.”

“Huh?” asked the seagull.

“We have weaker bones than you. We can be captured by humans by the neck.” The swan swam along to the other side of the seagull’s rock, smiling gently at him. “We mate for life.”

“???” The seagull had evolved beyond the need for words. He was having a bit of an existential crisis.

The swan dipped their head, almost as if nodding in sympathy. “The world is a terrifying place, little one,” it said, glancing up at the sun, which was slowly coming closer.

“No matter who you are. The world is a terrifying place.”

  
::

  
Hirugami Sachirou was so tall that at first Kourai was convinced he could go on all the adult roller coasters at DisneySea. At this point in his middle school career Kourai had long since stopped throwing things at walls. Instead he carried a volleyball around everywhere he went. This included the McDonald’s near his house, the convenience store, and the classroom. Hoshiumi Kourai breathed volleyball. It was the thing that got him up each morning, and the thing that knocked him out each night. Literally and/or metaphorically.

Hirugami did not seem to breathe volleyball so much as a volleyball lived in his lungs and made him wheeze uncontrollably every time he tried to talk. His face was as dark as the figures Kourai was convinced lined the hallways of the Tower of Terror ride, though he had not been able to ride it just yet. Every time Kourai glanced in his direction, Hirugami looked afraid.

“But WHY?” Kourai wanted badly to ask. “You’re so TALL.”

At this point in his middle school career Kourai had also discovered that not only was he short, everyone else in the world of volleyball was tall. Overwhelmingly tall. So much so that he stopped looking for four leaf clovers in the grass in exchange for always keeping a lookout for the tall, evil monsters that he knew played volleyball. Which was the sport that he played as well. Which was somehow different in their hands. Better.

He never got around to asking Hirugami about how he got so tall (genetics, probably? Destiny? Naruto?). But they saw each other one day after practice when Hirugami was scraping his knuckles along the rock-faced wall and Kourai felt a jolt of something sharp and terribly unpleasant run through him.

“I think I might not like volleyball that much after all,” said Hirugami Sachirou, who would later grow to be like ten feet tall.

Kourai thought about it for a moment. He thought about seagulls and sea foam and drowning. He contemplated the fate of the universe and the milk he hadn’t drank when he was a kid because he thought it was weird that you were drinking stuff that cows had made. He thought about volleyball.

“Okay,” he said. “Then stop.”

Hirugami Sachirou did not stop. Hirugami Sachirou got better and better and better, and in the act of seeing that happen to someone close enough to poke with his finger, Kourai felt that his world had somehow grown more cool. He was on a mission to collect all the cool things, after all. All the coolest moves. All the coolest words.

  
::

  
Hinata Shouyou is shorter than him. And weirder. And faster, faster in the speed of his growth and the rate at which he refracts all the light in the room.

Hinata Shouyou is also, Kourai decides, crazier, when he sees him herded off the court and the match falls into Kamomedai’s hands. Not cleanly, and yet surely.

He keeps going, with or without Hinata in his sights. He keeps going up.

  
::

  
According to some article published in the late 2000s, the average Japanese male is 172 centimeters tall. This means that Kourai, being 173.1 centimeters tall, is taller than the average Japanese male.

This means nothing to him. The average professional volleyball player is 301 cm tall and eats raw celery for breakfast. They can run around the world in just under three days, two days if they’re allowed a water break. The average professional volleyball player is a god.

Volleyball is about being tall. The weapons you can use against blockers are speed and height. But Kourai thinks that he’d like to amend that list. He’ll add in sound, and sweat, and really cool sports shoes custom-ordered from the Nike headquarters. He’ll add in the knowledge of what actually happens during the Tower of Terror ride at DisneySea.

He isn’t really thinking when the coach hands him the Schweiden Adlers’ jersey. There’s some static going on at the back of his mind, the way there always is. Volleyball. Today’s plans for dinner. Volleyball.

But other than that, it’s a sea of white in there. A spotless landscape so pure and blinding, you wouldn’t be able to tell where the sky and the sea broke away from each other unless you were right there at the end of the world to put your finger on it. And even then, you might put your finger on the wrong place. Failure is always an option.

That is, if you’re anyone other than Hoshiumi Kourai. If you’re Hoshiumi Kourai then failure is the afterthought. If you’re Hoshiumi Kourai then you were born with your eyes on the ceiling of the universe, where the earth’s atmosphere gives way to the endless expanse of outer space. If you’re Hoshiumi Kourai, then if someone tells you to run faster then you’ll run faster. If someone tells you to jump higher then you’ll jump higher. You’re used to being told you’re too much of everything, and yet not enough of the one thing that you need to be truly devastating.

Which is fine. You’ve never been one for the scenic route anyway. If given the chance you would rather launch yourself straight into the heart of the beast and then claw your way out.

Life is about clawing your way out of tight spaces. You would know this, having been born with the silver spoon so far out of reach, you didn’t learn of its existence until you were twelve. But you are at peace with this. You have made peace with this. You have conspired to be everything good and bold and strong in the universe, from the seagull to the swan to the pigeons sitting in the rafters, the sparrows at the park, the angels cresting the arc of the sun above your head.

And in the act of doing so, you have become the things you were once afraid of, and no longer have a reason to stare at your feet.

  
::

  
You see that? That’s how you fight in the air.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> as i type the end notes it is 2:24 a.m. and i was supposed to microwave my bread like an hour ago but an hour before that i read the new haikyuu chapter and bawled my eyes out (as i did the week before) and then was immediately possessed by the spirit of hans christian andersen to write this. i have given it like one (1) reread. i do not know what i have written. again, it is 2:2(now)6 a.m.  
> HOSHIUMI KOURAI  
> would love to hear your thoughts about him or this shitfest or the latest chapter, but your dog is cool too. hope you're getting by as quarantine continues to (quarantine). i am NOT. but HOSHIUMI KOURAI  
> is great, and so thank you for reading about me writing about hoshiumi kourai being great. i will go microwave my bread now.
> 
> have a good one


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